Comment by treis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by treis | Hacker News Reader

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>I always wondered why more stores didn't do this.

It's not an efficient way to ship stuff. Wandering around a store picking an order takes much longer than an optimized warehouse.

Square footage is much more expensive retail than in a warehouse. So the area (if there's even room for it) where you pack and ship stuff costs more.

Shipping is more expensive because you are doing a few boxes a day instead of a semi-truck a day to UPS/FedEx/USPS

It just doesn't work that well. Fine as a stop gap for a small retailer dipping their toes in the online market. But for any sort of scale the warehouse model is much better.

I think the article is way off here. Yeah, some Sam's Clubs in the middle of nowhere were converted and a high end retailer has the margins to absorb the inefficiency. But the idea that existing retail is going to convert to warehouses at any sort of scale is laughable. The real estate costs are prohibitive and they'll end up somewhere an hour away where land is cheap.

I’d add that order picking from retail shelves is pretty disruptive to retail customers with any volume. Every trip to the grocery store sees the popular aisle clogged with an employee picking 6 or 12 orders. Meanwhile the in-person customers stack up waiting for the picker to finish. It wouldn’t be so bad except the stores also put all kinds of impulse buy islands into the flow of traffic so that you can’t even transit the block.

IMO stores should pick by department, not order, then in the back room use put-to-light to divvy up the picks.

Let me clarify. I agree that in general having a centralized warehouse handle online orders is better than having retail stores do so, for the same reason why FedEx and UPS are more efficient in using a central transit hub in Kentucky/Tennessee even for an overnight package going from one location to another in the same city.

But surely even better is both? Have an online warehouse handle most orders, but have the inventory system integrated across warehouses and stores, so that if it turns out that an item is a) available in a store in the same metro area as the customer, and/or b) is out of stock in the warehouse, a store employee can pick and pack the order during a free moment and have the order arrive at the customer the next day?

Retail usually operates on thin margins. It's probably not cost effective to do that.

Wouldn't delivery be cheaper? Why are they shipping locally?

I'm guessing having your own delivery trucks would be cheaper, but only if you're doing enough volume (like, multiple packages per neighborhood per week). Walmart could probably get there, but not sure about smaller stores (even Best Buy).

They also have to be shipped to the store. End-to-end shipping costs won't be that different between the warehouse model or the retail model.

Hmm so why set up shop in a retail outlet then? Why not just ship directly from the warehouse?

If i'm understanding, the article is talking about using the retail outlet as a warehouse, where you have the items shipped from a warehouse to your retail outlet, and then shipped again to buyers.

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